ANDREI TARKOVSKY – THROUGH THE ARTIST EYE by Jessie Emkic

“What are you reading?” asks a man’s voice.
“Arseny Tarkovsky’s poems,” answers a woman in Italian.
“In Russian?”
“No, it’s a translation... quite a good one.”
“Throw it away,” the man says.
“Why? The translator’s a very good poet,” she responds.
“Poetry is untranslatable,” he continues, “like all art.”
“You may be right that poetry is untranslatable," she says, "but what about music? Music’s for example...”
He interrupts her speech and begins to sing a tune in Russian.
She smiles cynically: "What do you mean by that, what do you want to say?”
“It’s a Russian song,” he replies.
“But how could we have got to know Tolstoy, Pushkin (without translation) and so understand Russia?”
“None of you understand Russia,” the man exhales.
“Nor you Italy then," she says, "if Dante, Petrarch and Machiavelli don’t help."
"It's impossible for us poor devils," he utters.
"How can we get to know each other?" she asks him.
"By destroying frontiers."
"Which frontiers?"
"Between states," he replies.

Stalker, 1979, Andrej Tarkovskij
This conversation was taken from Andrei Tarkovsky's film 'Nostalgia'. The frontiers Tarkovsky speaks about are not only the frontiers of our countries, or the cultural and linguistic frontiers we may encounter. It is the frontiers of the mind as well, he speaks about, the frontiers the person carries within oneself.

'Nostalgia' was the very first film that Tarkovsky made outside Russia. Undoubtedly one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, he was born in the Soviet Union in 1932. He studied cinema and enjoyed great success in both the Soviet Union and outside. But the Soviet authorities grew displeased with Tarkovsky’s personal portrayals of people's lives, which seemed to pose elementary questions about human existence. Lacking financial means to make further films, Tarkovsky was forced to send a letter to the Soviet authorities asking for a cinematographic assignment for he was so poor that he was not only unable to make films, but unable to feed his family. The pressure on him not subsiding, Tarkovsky left Russia in order to continue making films, settling at first in Italy. This is where the story of 'Nostalgia' begins, of the film, and the reflection on Tarkovsky's own personal nostalgia.

Tarkovsky used cinematic poetry to portray the inner process of the protagonist Gorchakov as he travells through Italy, researching for his book. In fact, the protagonist Gorchakov is Tarkovsky, and like Tarkovsky, Gorchakov searches for answers to existential questions, he searches to explore human relationships through the experience of consciousness, moving from general to personal and back, recollecting the memories of his childhood, his mother and his native land. But Gorchakov’s character has an embellishing flaw - he is dying of nostalgia.

"The film became the echo of my own suffering," Tarkovsky said in an interview, adding that nostalgia “is in fact an illness that removes strength from the spirit, the capacity to work and even the pleasure of living”.

"It is a moral suffering of the spirit," he said. "Those who cannot overcome it, die."

Asked during an interview why he doesn't believe it is enough for us to visit one another, to meet and talk, to exchange art, to travel, asked why we won't understand one another by the means of communication, Tarkovsky replied with a symbolic statement "man is bound to his culture so closely that for one to understand the culture of another, he must, as we say in Russia, 'eat a ton of salt together'!"

To paraphrase Susan Sontag "if you want to know what people are truly like, go and live with them." Eat with them, be with them, live with them. In order to understand the other we must not just pay attention to words, meanings, sentences, ideas, interpretations of history, and distorted pictures. We must share our lives with others, those different from us. And indeed, it wasn't that long ago a tradition was practiced by Austrian and Czech families living on the shared border: for a period of time, Austrian families would send their children to live with Czech host families and learn Czech language, and Czech families would send their kids to the Austrian side to learn German. The children would learn each others languages, each others life-styles, cuisine and another way of thinking. And they would learn how to get along and live together.

Tarkovsky's cinema introduced us to the universal within the individual, the individual as a part of the universe. He introduced us to a poem, which speaks in pictures of the entire universe being contained in one single person. It is a single person who is a part of nature and the four elements. The nature is not an adversary, but a vehicle to transcend the borders of that, which is apprehensible only by language, by its name, and reach a spiritual realm, which is known and present, but cannot be named. So many questions about the human condition, and they always dissolve to a single one: Who am I?

And the answer to that question is: 'I am'.

When we are born we are given a name by which other people recognize us. We are given a birth date to go along with the name, and we are told our gender. Then we are told the names of things and people surrounding us, subsequently we are told about the world, what is good and what is bad, what we are allowed to do and what not. At some point, we will learn how to walk and explore the world on our own. We will attain habits and learn to talk. Subsequently we will be told which religion we belong to, or if we have one. And then at some other point, we will hear that we are going to die one day. We are born and we die. We will be told about God, about others who are different from us, which country we come from and what our people are called. Later we will be told other things too, more personal, more intimate things. We will of course experience sensations and create ideas about what we are like, what the world is like. We will start thinking, remembering, identifying ourselves with our ideas, our mind. In short, we will become a person. At this stage we already identify with the 'I-am-my-body' idea and this is where the suffering starts. We take what we believe to know to be the true, to be an indisputable fact. We believe things on hearsay and identify with them, we read about the world in books and newspapers, watch it on TV, we even believe to find proofs of our ideas in what surrounds us, we fantasize.

But where is this 'I' that I seem to know so well in the waking state, when I am sleeping? Where is this 'I' when I am dreaming? And where is this ‘I’ when I’m in dreamless sleep?' Tarkovsky used his art not to find answers to these questions, but as a means to explore them.

For Tarkovsky, his camera lens was the eye he looked himself with. He observed himself by observing birch forests, nature, grass, childhood memories, the sky at dawn and sun rising, the air of the country. He wasn’t afraid to observe himself through someone else’s face, projecting his own image onto the screen and seeing the other. He showed us the human imagination, the dreams, the relationships, the emotions, the passing of time, life, death, and the Great Unknown. The cinema was the mirror he could observe himself in, detached from the world, unaffected by events, compassionate to his characters and above all, humble.

Observing his image in the mirror Tarkovsky saw himself, and discovered the other. He became the astronaut, the stalker, the translator, the dog, the poet, the man, the woman, the artist, the violinist, the desperate Italian translator, the Spaniard in Russia, the Russian in Italy, the stutterer who gets healed through hypnosis, the orphaned child of war. He became the world and the world became him.

"For me, cinema is simply an original way to create a new universe," he once said.
Let us speak with the language of the cinema, let us have the pictures speak for themselves.

Film Program
Filmmuseum in Vienna will be showing a retrospective of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films in March 2009. Special guests on March 5th and 6th include Margarita Terekhova (protagonist in "The Mirror"), Nikolay Burlyaev (lead actor in "Ivan's Childhood" amongst other roles), the actor Yuri Nazarov and the great cinematographer Vadim Yusov, who was responsible for the visual style of Tarkovsky's films up to and including "Solaris".

Watch
Andrei Tarkovsky talks about art and spirituality.

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